The media company that can figure out how to produce news or news adjacent video content without relying on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, broadcast TV, cable, or corporate streamers will make a billion dollars and probably help save American democracy — or exist long enough to document its end

I would add to this *stop using Meta products and X altogether.* You can’t fight fascism with the tools controlled by fascists.

Far more dangerous than Trump, I think, is how quickly the last eight months have pulled back the curtain on America's elites and shown everyone how venal, how cowardly and how utterly mediocre the foundation of our society has been.

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

Ngl today several different online platforms all independently making a strong case that social media is bad for society

rarely have I more acutely felt the dynamic by which Dems are held responsible for the rhetoric of every random left-leaning person on the internet and Republicans are not even asked to answer for their own personal words

An important difference between conservatism and liberalism these days is that “being shitty to people you disagree with” is an explicit, widely shared social value in conservatism but there’s no equivalent in liberalism. It’s just easier and more preferred for liberals to walk away

Such an odd thing to read in the newspaper www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

A great take on a serious problem that happens to feature a book by a high school classmate of mine

One thing I feel like everyone needs to understand: those social-democratic Scandinavian nations we're all jealous of? Their market economies are *less regulated* than ours. More free. It's just that they collect a lot of taxes on the back end & fund social services & infrastructure.

Hairshirt

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

No new pictures, where are you at mentally?

This is one of the absolute toughest things about predatory inclusion — the predation is often fun or a little useful. Criticism makes a reasonable person sound like an asshole. LowerEd weathered me for this kind of social death. So I’ll say it: your enjoyment does not matter & should not matter.

yeah I'll incorporate AI into my workflow. the workflow of my butt

It’s probably pointless to ask why the Cracker Barrel rebrand is woke, but I’m trying to figure out if this is a new twist in an old research topic

I love to show up every day for my job, which is standing around holding the front of my tactical vest and getting told to choke to death by thousands of passers-by while 11 of my coworkers handcuff a roofer on his way to work. Every night I drive 80 minutes home, thinking about nothing at all.

As a Californian, he’ll never get my vote again unless under extreme duress. But I also want him to keep doing politics like what he’s doing today and I want other Dems to follow his lead

Slightly diminish a band: Eight Inch Nails

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

DC statehood is now an imperative. No more dicking around. Next Dem majority, get it done immediately.

we can’t build a society that works on the back of whether the richest people in that society feel like helping according to their whims the kind of person who gets that rich doesn’t get there by spreading the wealth around you have to take some of it away

If red states do this, every single blue state must do it too

Earthquake

I started taking the subway to school in sixth grade. It was Boston, at a time when crime was objectively much worse than today and it was never — literally never — a problem

An eloquent image: Setting aside the content under the tarp for a moment, teens were asked to make art expressing what it is like to be a teen, and the end result was a mural wrapped in a tarp by adults. I bet a lot of teens would find this expressive of their experience.

If you’d told me a decade ago that the NYT and WaPo would roll over for a Republican president going full fascist while the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal went on the attack — and that Bill Kristol was pressing the attack harder than Nancy Pelosi — well, I’d have had you committed.

This from @garymarcus.bsky.social is exactly where I land: the computers aren’t the real threat, it’s the humans who control the computers that we really need to worry about. Serious talk of rogue AI is mostly a gambit to distract us from seeing who the real rogues are

(guy who controls the government) it was uh, the Deeper State

some of my best, most valuable, college classes were straight-up lectures sure, it depends on audience/context/material, but the wholesale valorization of "student-centered" classrooms (in the humanities at least) ceded the cultural capital of expertise in truly damaging ways

👑

Big fan of democracy but we'll have to admit it's an L of historic proportions to get subverted and destroyed not by some strategic genius but by possibly the dumbest man on earth

I think most people severely underestimated how much fascism and kleptocracy would triumph through the surrender and default of forces that should have opposed it.

“Independence day is canceled because of fear of secret police raids” is really a level of on the nose political symbolism you just can’t make up.

hey remember when a rich ceo died then when they caught the suspect they made a circus of it like they found osama bin laden and charged him with terrorism but less than weeks ago two democrat lawmakers and their spouses were shot as literal assassination to shift control and everyone already forgot

Pack the Court. If we are serious about the defense of these rights, we pack the Court. Simple as that. They pack it back, we pack it again. We do it until we reach consensus on long-term reforms to the judiciary. I don't know what it's going to take for people to get it.

Wtf

I think the most frustrating thing about seeing it visualized is that you only had to tweak things just a bit to get to a Harris victory. It’s one reason discourse is so toxic about this because it was a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario and everyone wants to blame a specific cut for the loss.

It’s Hot Woodcut Summer

Primary every Democrat who is not meeting this moment. Get rid of them all.

They are trying to cripple states that don't allow them to force AI down your throat. Broadband access is a utility now even if we pretend it isn't. AI stans, read the fucking writing on the wall. If an authoritarian government is trying to force something on the public, it is bad.

I seriously think the Social Internet is 21st century cigarettes. Complete with secondary smoke causing a lot of harm in nonusers.

They’re going to try to make you feel insane for opposing this war. They’ll ignore protests and downplay any opposition. They’ll try to strongarm you into submission. They did it with Iraq and they’ll do it again. And then a few years later they’ll pretend they were with you all along.

This was almost certainly intentional. It’s not just him getting the name wrong; he’s invoking one of the more infamous bad guys from the height of the war on terror

I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future. But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.

oh just a quick reminder that consumer-facing LLMs and generative “A.i.” are bad for society and the environment and damage human creativity and cognition just say no thx egg-hitting-hot-pan.gif